The Squares of the City (43 page)

In a little while I was able to sit up. The bullet had gone clear through, making a shallow groove in the flesh rather than a hole, and the substance of the muscle was hardly touched. I could even move the arm—stiffly, but without great pain—when it was dressed.

Maria Posador watched me with her face quite expressionless.

“I will not ask your forgiveness,” she said at length. “Once before—soon after I came back to Aguazul five years ago—there was an ambush laid for me. I was beaten about the head and left to die.”

She reached up and drew back her sleek black hair from her left temple. With a quick twitch she removed one of the tresses—a postiche. Where it had been, a patch of red, granular scar tissue showed on her scalp.

She left it visible just long enough for me to take in its meaning. Then, deftly, she restored her hair to its original immaculate state.

“So,” she said levelly. “It was because of that, you understand. I have not been out very often to that place since the television center was burned down. But last night I heard a strange noise, and it occurred to me to—well, to see if there had been trouble. It was perhaps foolhardy to go out alone, but what could I do?

“And then I came to the shed, and I saw fresh scratches on the lock, as though someone had tried to open it with a wrong key. So I returned to get my gun, and—there you were.”

I nodded. There was a little more brandy in the glass at my side. I sipped it carefully. “I must have frightened you, coming for you with that iron bar,” I said. “But—who did it? Who kidnapped me and brought me here?”

“We will find out,” she said in a voice like ice breaking. “We will find out.”

There was a silence. The motherly woman came back into the room carrying a tray loaded with breakfast—hot coffee, glasses of fruit juice, half a dozen native cold dishes in little glass bowls.

“Drink coffee,” said Maria Posador stonily. “It will aid the refreshing stimulus of the brandy you have taken.”

I shivered a little, although the room was very warm. I said, “You know, if it hadn’t been for that cable I trod on—which knocked me off my balance—I’d be dead now. I’m sure of it.”

She gave a grave nod. “I have no doubt that was what was intended.”

Something clicked in my mind, and I gave a grunt of astonishment. “That cigarette you gave me last night—was it—
was that cigarette doped?
”

I half-rose to my feet, my mind flooding with suspicion. She looked at me calmly.

“Not so far as I am aware. Who could have obtained my own case? Who could have ensured that I gave you that cigarette and no other?”

“You could,” I said. There was silence for a while.

“I could,” she said at last. “But in that case—would I have missed my aim?”

“Possibly. You might be—oh, hell, you wouldn’t have had to go to all that trouble.” I subsided, feeling that I had said several stupid things.

“Of course not,” was the calm comment. “You are a weapon in a struggle which trembles on the verge of open civil war. Enough people hate you for it to be possible to find an assassin to destroy you. No, señor! Your destruction was to have been linked to mine, plainly! Well, that has failed. But it may be tried again. I would suggest to you that you leave the country at once, today, but some formality would certainly be found to hinder your going. … I am sorry that you should be involved as you are. But, as you yourself have said to me, we are at the mercy of impersonal forces.”

“I don’t think these forces are so impersonal,” I said grimly. “I think I’m being pushed around by individuals’ whims—as though I were one of those men who march around that life-size chessboard at Presidential House! What kind of impersonal force carried me up here from my hotel room and put me where it was an even chance you would think I was lying in ambush for you? It looks to me as if someone—whoever, Vados or Diaz or someone—were pushing me
and you
about exactly like bits of carved wood being shoved from square to square on a board!”

“Señor,” said Maria Posador heavily, “you must understand that for twenty years
el Presidente
—with the guidance of the late but not lamented Alejandro Mayor—has ruled his country by means direct and indirect. He has moved not individuals but whole masses of people at his whim. Once, a long time ago, I was capable of feeling as you do about the fact—but I was very young when my husband …”

Her voice broke suddenly. “Sixteen? Seventeen?” I suggested gently.

She nodded, not looking at me. “Seventeen. I was married very young. Oh, things have changed for me—once I swore I would follow where he had gone, once I swore I would wear black until I died, again I thought I would enter a convent. … Then here I am, as you see me.” She gestured up and down, indicating her tailored shirt, her biscuit-colored slacks, with all their air of some expensive resort.

I cupped my hands around the thick pottery mug of coffee I had been given; there was still much heat in it, and it stung my palm where the skin had been grazed.

I said, “Up till last night I was proposing to get out of Ciudad de Vados as fast as I could, and be glad to see the last of the place. Now I’m not any longer just waiting to collect my pay. I’m not interested in that sort of thing anymore. It’s a different kind of pay I want, and who’s going to settle the account I don’t know. But someone is. Someone most definitely is going to pay.”

XXXI

The motherly woman scuttled into the room, her face wide-eyed and anxious. “Señora!” she exclaimed. “There are police cars at the gate! Pancho will try to delay them, but it cannot be for long.”

Maria Posador reacted with instant decision. “That will probably be because someone has warned them to come here and seek a corpse. Quickly—you must go into the cellar. I have a concealed retreat arranged down there, against emergencies.”

We were already moving as she finished explaining; it was like a priest’s hole in an old English house, comfortable, well ventilated, and completely hidden. It was a relic of her early days after her return, when she was still half afraid that Vados regarded her as a menace to be eliminated at the most convenient moment.

“Myself, I have never had to use it,” she added. “But—others have. More than once political opponents of Vados have found safety here; I wished to offer refuge to Fats Brown, but he chose otherwise, and …”

And I was scrambling inside.

It was awkward with my injured arm, but I made it, and I waited there tensely for more than an hour, wishing I’d asked for cigarettes to ease the strain.

Eventually the houseman let me out and helped me back upstairs, where I found Maria Posador sitting in a chair and tapping thoughtfully on the arm with perfectly kept nails.

“Would you care to guess,” was her first remark, “who it was who grew worried about you and sent the police here to make inquiries?”

I shook my head.

“It was Señor Angers.”

“Good God! But—oh, I suppose it was on some flimsy excuse like you having been the last person I was seen talking to last night.”

“You have a good understanding of the minds of our police. Of course, they work on uncomplicated principles. I managed to drive them away temporarily, but I must arrange to conceal the effects of the bullet I fired at you—it will have left traces on the wall, of course, and may have broken something, though I do not know. And someone, it is said, heard the shot. I think it would certainly be best for both of us if you were to remain in concealment here for a little.”

“I’ll cheerfully keep out of the way of the police till this evening,” I said. “But I have a date tonight that I wouldn’t miss for the world. I’m invited to dinner at Presidential House, and I want to tell Vados what I think of his beloved city now.”

She smiled. “I learned very early in life that one’s involvements go always deeper than one intends. One is linked with a particular world. Often one would prefer it otherwise. But there are certain ties and obligations that cannot be dissolved. Were I to have abandoned my country, moved somewhere where I was unknown, I should still have been fastened securely to my old self by knowledge of duty unfulfilled. …”

Wistful sadness filled the mellow voice, the violet eyes.

“Very well, then,” she finished in a brisker tone. “You will remain here until evening. You will require various things—clothing, and so on, which I will obtain for you. And when you wish to go to Presidential House a hired car will call for you. The driver will be a discreet man; whatever has been said in the city regarding your disappearance, he will ask no questions.”

Twice in the course of the day the police returned—the first time armed with a search warrant, which implied that somebody at any rate was pretty sure where I was; the second time in the person of
el Jefe
O’Rourke, who apologized to Señora Posador for bothering her and gave the interesting news that Vados had turned the heat on him. As far as he himself was concerned, he was satisfied that I wasn’t here.

To outward appearance, of course, I wasn’t. I was in the hiding-place in the cellar again.

Clothing arrived as promised—evening dress rented from a company in the city, which fitted me excellently. I put it on when O’Rourke had been there and it was fairly certain that I could emerge from hiding safely. My arm was stiff, sore and cramped, but I could move it without dislodging the dressing, and there was no bleeding.

I had not been told any particular time to arrive at Presidential House; and it seemed to me that eight o’clock would be about right, and Maria Posador confirmed my guess.

She offered to lend me her gun, but I refused; I wasn’t as ambitious as Angers to play cops and robbers, and in any case I couldn’t hide it if I took it. Someone might ask me awkward questions if I tried to go into Vados’s home with a gun, and if anybody was going to ask awkward questions this evening, I intended it to be myself.

The hired car turned up sharp on time. Taut-faced, worried, Maria Posador took leave of me as I went out to it.

“Almost I envy you,” she said wistfully. “Maybe there are advantages in rootlessness, after all. What happens here in my country hurts me—all the more because I know that if I myself do more than a very little to alter the situation, I shall cause more harm than good. Will you come back here, or return to your hotel?”

“I’ll go back to the hotel,” I said. “After what I’m going to say to Vados, I think people will stop worrying me. I hope.”

“Good luck then, and be assured that we will find out if it is at all possible who sought to destroy you by bringing you here this morning.
Hasta la vista, y—
”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but turned and went back indoors, shaking her head thoughtfully.

I thought, as I was getting into the car, that there was a
hell
of a woman. One of the first things I could recall noticing about her was the way she sought respect not for her femininity but for herself, and now she’d certainly got that respect from me. I could have imagined things developing a thousand different ways—only I couldn’t imagine them, after all. Suppose I’d come to Aguazul at leisure, rather than on business and restricted by my own self-imposed rules. I’d more than likely have done the usual things—the round of dinners and shows and so on; I’d have wanted a companion as charming and sophisticated as Maria Posador, and I wouldn’t have got her.

The hell with that sort of thing, though. I had a vague feeling that we might come out of this actual friends, and somehow that seemed like a very fair—even generous—reward.

The ride to Presidential House was a short one, for we were already half the distance from the center of the city to the hillside on which the great building was set. Almost before I knew it we were checked through the gates and up the driveway; evidently I was still expected. At any rate, the guards seemed to know I was coming.

A servant came to open the door of the car for me, and directed my driver where to park. Before going indoors, I looked down over the lawn and saw that the huge chessboard was once again unrolled on the grass. By the light of a floodlamp a few men were being rehearsed in the moves of another game.

From the outside, Presidential House was pillared and traditional; the interior, on the other hand, was superbly free of fuss. I waited under cool white discharge lamps on the buff-colored plastic floor of the entrance hall, looking at a magnificent piece of Inca sculpture set off by flowers so arranged as to resemble votive offerings to the god. The servant who had escorted me inside went to announce my presence.

The result I wasn’t prepared for.

The door through which the man had gone reopened in a matter of seconds, to pass him and someone else—presumably, from his stately bearing and evening dress, the chief butler. His expression, however, was far from matching his bearing; he seemed to be thrown into consternation by the sight of me.

“Señor Hakluyt!” he exclaimed. “You—you were delayed, yes?”

“I was delayed,” I said. “But that was this morning. Here I am as you see me. What’s wrong?”

“Señor, dinner is—has just been—I will inform his excellency the president—”

What had got into the man? I said harshly, “Don’t trouble yourself. Vados didn’t give me a time to come. If there are apologies to be made, I’ll make them myself. Is he in there?”